Serious Men Quotes

“The fate of every love story, he knew very well, is in the rot of togetherness, or in the misery of separation. Lovers often choose the first with the same illusory wisdom that makes people choose to die later than now.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“Scientists want to search for alien signals because that's what gets them publicity. They are like Jesus Christ."

"Jesus Christ?" Nambodri asked, with a faintly derogatory chuckle.

"Yes. They are exactly like Jesus Christ. You know that he turned water into wine."

"I've heard that story."

"From the point of view of pure chemistry, it is more miraculous to make wine into water than water into wine. But he did not do that. Because if he had gone to someone's house and converted their wine into water, they would have crucified him much earlier. He knew, Jana. He knew making water into wine was a more popular thing to do.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“The end of an ox is beef, the end of a lie is grief.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“Marriage needed the absurdity of values.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“The tragedy of mediocrity is that even mediocre people shake their heads and mull over how “standards are falling”. So”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“A man cannot be exactly the way he wants to be and also dream of keeping his wife”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“Yes, Yes. Indians were the oldest civilization on Earth, the greatest, the best. And only Indians had culture. Others were all dumb nomads and whores.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“The dedication of passwords was the new fellowship of marriage. To each other, couples had become furtive asterisks”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“After riding like a moron all over the place, observe the face of an Indian when he crashes. He is stunned.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“Free love,Ayaan knew, is an enchanting place haunted by demented women”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“From what Ayyan had heard of the battles of the Brahmins, it would be bloodless but brutal. They would fight like demons armed with nothing more than deceit and ideals - another form of deceit among men from good families.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“And one day, very soon in fact, Adi would be an adolescent. An adolescent son of a clerk. A miserable thing to be in this country. He would have to forget all his dreams and tell himself that what he wanted to do was engineering. It's the only hope, everyone would tell him. Engineering, Adi would realize, is every mother's advice to her son, a father's irrevocable decision, a boy's first foreboding of life.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“He was wearing a blue tracksuit that had a white tick mark embroidered at the hip, as if he approved of something.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“You can tell me. A man can tell a naked woman anything.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“That men, in reality, did not have friends in other men. That the fellowship of men, despite its joyous banter, old memories of exaggerated mischief and the altruism of sharing pornography, was actually a farcical fellowship. Because what a man really wanted was to be bigger than his friends.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“Operna did not understand this habit of Indian men. If they could letch at her so overtly, they might as well ask her directly who she was. Why did they always turn to someone else and say, 'Wont you introduce us?' It was so pathetic.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“After riding like a moron all over the place, observes the face of an Indian when he crashes. He is stunned.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“Most of you will probably never really discover anything. You may not contribute anything to the great equations that describe the universe to the world. But you will have the good fortune of encountering people of exceptional intelligence. People who are much smarter than you. Never get in their way, never group together in disgruntled circles and play games. Respect talent, real talent. Worship it. Clever people will always be disliked. Don’t exploit that to crawl your way to the top. By the laws of probability most of you are mediocre. Accept it. The tragedy of mediocrity is that even mediocre people shake their heads and mull over how “standards are falling”. So don’t mull. Just know when you’ve to get out of the way. Most of you will be sideshows, extras in the grand unfolding of truth. That’s all right. Once you accept that and let the best brains do their jobs, you will have done your service to science and mankind.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“A man on a bike was riding on the pavement. When he tried to plunge into the road, a car hit him. He fell down but managed to get up. He looked shocked. That, Ayyan loved. After riding like a moron all over the place, observe the face of an Indian when he crashes. He is stunned.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men: A Novel

“It’s a myth that Sanskrit is the best language for writing computer code. Patriotic Indians have spread this lie for many years—Bill Gates”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“A mysterious character of UFOs is that they are sighted only in the First World,' she said, 'and no alien conquest of Earth begins until the mayor of New York holds an emergency press conference. When Mars attacks, it attacks America.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“The fate of every love story, he knew very well, is in the rot of togetherness, or in the misery of separation.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“it is in the nature of love to be disproportionate with both rewards and retributions.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men: A Novel

“That perilous distance from where the face of any woman would look ugly.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“She made him sad, but he also longed for this sorrow to arrive in his room as often as possible in that ascetic uniform of long top and jeans, the cassock of her platonic detachment.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“She walked to the door and looked at him with an affection that was at once hopeful and melancholic. Like light was both particle and wave.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men: A Novel

“she would smile when she learnt that the ladies’ rest-room on the third floor was called Ladies and the men’s was called Scientists. She would endure the men who inescapably fell towards her in the corridors and gave her guidance she never sought. She would try to pass through the long corridors of this place like a shadow, and she would fail every day.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“he tried to look at her face in the hope that she was not pretty. Beautiful women depressed him. They were like Mercedes, BlackBerry phones and sea-view homes.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“The unfortunate are not as miserable as the world imagines. That urchins, the handicapped, orphans, prisoners and others are much happier than people think. And that language is a trap, that a dark evolutionary force has created languages to limit human thought. That writers are overrated fools. That all religions come from ancient comic writers. And the ultimate goal of comics is same as the purpose of humanity – to break free from language.”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men

“In the twilight that was now the colour of dust, in the fury of horns that was a national language because honking had telegraphic properties..”
― Manu Joseph, Serious Men